There goes Voyager 1, slipping the surly bonds of the solar system and heading out into the frozen vastness of space, proudly proclaiming its human origins to an indifferent void. It will still send back messages from interstellar space, if anything happens out there.

It is thrilling, though, isn't it? I mean, aside from its essential pointlessness. The idea of a human artifact all the way out there where the sun is just a bright star, speeding its way toward ... well, that's the problem. The point of the journey is the journey; the destination is just wherever the darned thing finally gives up the ghost.

We don't thrill to space exploration anymore. The times have become narrower. We are turning our technological firepower on solving problems that our technological firepower got us into in the first place. The next hundred years (best-case scenario) will be spent cleaning up what the previous hundred years have done.

All very good for the oil-spill abatement business, perhaps less good for visionary projects. Now private companies want to go into space and want you to pay big bucks to be on the back of a rocket. This kind of fairgrounds exploration is the only kind that's being done right now.

With the mania for cutting budgets, do you think NASA is going to get a large new infusion of cash? I don't. Voyager 1 is a reminder of a time when we were going to build a spaceship in outer space and send it on a path of planetary exploration. People were talking about 15-year spaceflights. Heady times.

A lot of that came about, I would contend, because the golden age of science fiction happened 30 years earlier. The kids who read science fiction, who read so much that they just assumed that rocket ships were what the future was supposed to be doing, got their hands on some branches of government, and all of a sudden "a man on the moon" became a worthy national goal.

I can't imagine what would happen now if a moon shot were suddenly declared to be the highest value for our nation. Everyone would complain. Hell, probably I would complain. "All the problems in the inner cities, and we choose to spend money on a bauble like a moon landing." I can hear myself now.

But I think the space program had a lot of civic virtue. For one thing, it brought people closer to science than they might otherwise have been. It made them appreciate what was complicated about the task, and the integrity of the people doing the work. Scientists appeared on television and everything. You don't see that happening anymore.

There has been such a discouraging anti-intellectual trend in this country, the rise of which seems to mirror the rise of the Tea Party. Anti-Darwinism is not a front-burner issue right now, but the whole controversy is still very real, and evolutionary biology is still having a rough go in many places. When you believe that all science must start with revealed truth, you've pretty much abandoned ship.

Of course, these dark ages are going side by side with an era of unprecedented innovation in communications. Things are just not as they used to be, and we're not quite that sure what that means yet. Things will mutate and mutate again, and even today's Millennials will be left behind by the innovations of 2050.

Still, if there is a yin and yang of history, it is periods of great innovation alternating with periods of dismal retrenchment. We are still wandering in the great light provided by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. That light remains strong, and yet everywhere we see signs of tribalism and ignorance. There are always barbarians at the gates, I suppose; it's just that sometimes the barbarians win.

Barbarians would have no interest in space travel. It is the product of a questing civilization. Barbarians are into pillaging and looting and, sometimes, forcing their God down your throat. It is scary to see them on the rise, both at home and internationally.

Of course, our very own higher civilization is responsible for numerous atrocities; a belief in science does not make a person immune to the diseases of bigotry or cruelty. But the virtue of virtue is trumpeted by the religious authorities, whose hands are not all that clean themselves. Just foolish humans here, trying to understand the universe.

Nevertheless, we wish Voyager a fond farewell. It's out there telling the future a story about the past. Bon voyage.

Say, you've been a great little solar system; be sure to tip your waiters.

"The first thing I've got to do," said Alice to herself as she wandered about in the wood, "is to grow to my right size again; and the second thing is to find jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.